John Canemaker is not only a dear friend, but the entire animation world's. He is an Oscar-award winning animator as well as film historian and NYU professor. He's done half of Disney classic films' commentary tracks with Leonard Maltin doing the other half. (An exaggeration, but close enough.) His books on Winsor McCay, Felix the Cat and many Disney animators are just spectacular. He has done animation for the songs of John Lennon as well as The World According to Garp. But his own indie animation is even better!

I cannot recommend the Shirley Clarke films enough, having been fortunate enough to catch the 35mm restorations of each one of then when they played in Los Angeles. I'm going to order Ornette: Made in America this week and can't stress enough what an incredible portrait it is of one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. I also love Portrait of Jason , a film that's equal parts hilarious, heartbreaking, and uncomfortable and captures a particular kind of queerness that seemed to be undocumented then. It's a film that I think about a lot and captures that beautiful mix of documentary and imposed narrative that wasn't captured again until Abaas Kiarostami's Close-Up.

For every DVD or Blu-ray sold on the Milestone website starting now through the end of 2017, Milestone will donate $1 to the
Southern Poverty Law Center
to help support its efforts to “monitor hate groups and other extremists throughout the United States and expose their activities to the public, the media and law enforcement.”

drdoros wrote:You're right -- Charlotte's a rare town for us to play our films. Do you have a favorite art theatre you would recommend?

Dennis, do you ever show your films in the Boston area? There are three that I can think of that would show your caliber of movies: Kendall Square Cinema in Cambridge, West Newton Cinema in Newton, and Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline.

drdoros wrote:You're right -- Charlotte's a rare town for us to play our films. Do you have a favorite art theatre you would recommend?

Dennis, do you ever show your films in the Boston area? There are three that I can think of that would show your caliber of movies: Kendall Square Cinema in Cambridge, West Newton Cinema in Newton, and Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline.

My good friends Terri Francis and Brian Graney of the Indiana University Black Film Archive is trying to raise funds to provide a headstone to the grave of Alice Micheaux, the wife of Oscar. "Alice B. Russell Micheaux was a pioneering film actress and film producer, as well as the widow of Oscar Micheaux, renowned African American filmmaker, active during the silent era through the 1940s. Yet unfortunately, Alice spent her final years as a ward of the state suffering from dementia, and was buried in 1985 in an unmarked pauper’s grave at the Greenwood Union Cemetery in Rye, New York."

Is the any chance of Killer of Sheep getting a Blu-ray upgrade? I skipped a screening earlier this year, not knowing anything about it, and have seen it mentioned nearly weekly since doing so, much to my chagrin. I may have to plump for the DVD, but I dislike buying DVDs, especially blind-buys of films that seem important enough to one day get upgraded.